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9 months ago

on

January 1, 2019

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President Donald Trump is in a showdown with the House and Senate over his demand for border wall funding. As the government shutdown goes into its second week, the Washington Post editorial board mocked the president for causing more problems on the border while he demands his wall.

“In the name of securing the border and keeping out illegal immigrants, President Trump has opted for a partial government shutdown. Irony of ironies, that shutdown has paralyzed the nation’s immigration courts, shuttering many of them and allowing several hundred undocumented immigrants to dodge deportation orders each day the shutdown continues,” the Post wrote in its New Year’s Day editorial. “They are among many hundreds of others whose cases will be postponed for years — or, in effect, indefinitely — for every day the closure lasts.”

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Many of the effects of the shutdown have been the daily lives and finances of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, contractors and government-funded programs and scientists. Left out of the cable news coverage are about 400 immigration judges that have been told not to work.

“The immigration courts are already massively jammed: The backlog is now 1.1 million cases,” the editorial continues. It means every day that the shutdown persists, thousands of cases aren’t being heard. They’ll ultimately be rescheduled three or four years from this shutdown, when Trump might not even be president anymore.

“In fact, the backlog has reached such gargantuan proportions that judges are already double- and triple-booking future court dates, like an airline overbooking flights, meaning that many cases on the docket will inevitably be postponed repeatedly,” said the Post.

Trump has already raged against the immigration courts and judges, saying that he wants to eliminate the Constitution’s “due process” Amendment for immigrants.

We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents…

….Our Immigration policy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Immigration must be based on merit – we need people who will help to Make America Great Again!

Trump has incorrectly claimed that when courts release immigrants into the United States with a court date, they rarely show up. The fact is that the overwhelming majority do appear for their court date.

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“What distinguishes the Trump shutdown is that it contravenes the president’s own long-standing insistence on a more rational and efficient immigration system, as he himself defines it,” the Post closed. “A president who attacks “catch and release ” now embraces a policy that ensures indefinite release. A president hungry for ever more deportations now ensures that thousands of would-be deportees get reprieves. And a president who conjures migrant no-shows in courts manages to close the courts entirely.”

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Enjoy this piece?

… then let us make a small request. Like you, we here at Raw Story believe in the power of progressive journalism — and we’re investing in investigative reporting as other publications give it the ax. Raw Story readers power David Cay Johnston’s DCReport, which we've expanded to keep watch in Washington. We’ve exposed billionaire tax evasion and uncovered White House efforts to poison our water. We’ve revealed financial scams that prey on veterans, and efforts to harm workers exploited by abusive bosses. We’ve launched a weekly podcast, “We’ve Got Issues,” focused on issues, not tweets. Unlike other news sites, we’ve decided to make our original content free. But we need your support to do what we do.

Raw Story is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. We’re not part of a conglomerate, or a project of venture capital bros. From unflinching coverage of racism, to revealing efforts to erode our rights, Raw Story will continue to expose hypocrisy and harm. Unhinged from corporate overlords, we fight to ensure no one is forgotten.

Ex-prosecutor demands congressional investigation after latest report on the FBI and Brett Kavanaugh

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had another allegation of sexual misconduct revealed on Saturday in a bombshell report in The New York Times.

"A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly," the newspaper reported.